Developing the Acceptance of Climate Change Scale for Undergraduate Students

University Of Northern Colorado, Greeley CO

Investigators

Abstract

This project aims to serve the national interest by providing educators with a new survey to uncover the many aspects of climate change acceptance in undergraduate science students. Many Americans, and specifically undergraduate students, accept that global climate change is occurring; however, no clear definitions of climate change acceptance currently exist in the literature. Therefore, this Engaged Student Learning: Level 1 project intends to address the question of what aspects of climate change students are accepting and which aspects may be obscured by current surveys. Climate change education in science fields (e.g., biology, chemistry, geosciences) can identify common student alternative conceptions, help students link climate change to their everyday lives, and foster climate literacy and knowledge. Evidence from research on other socioscientific issues (i.e., evolution education) suggests that understanding and acceptance are tied together in unpredictable ways. Although current scales exist to measure climate change acceptance, this project aims to develop a new survey (i.e. Acceptance of Climate Change Scale (ACC)) to capture its complexity that is specifically designed for undergraduate science students. The narrowness of existing scales likely leads to inaccuracy in capturing the many aspects of climate change acceptance and may subsequently lead to unreliable data which may misinform instruction. This project will produce a novel survey that examines aspects of undergraduate science students' acceptance of climate change with the goal of increasing the effectiveness of climate change education for undergraduate science students. The broader significance and importance of this new survey is that it will lead to recommendations about which climate change topics to include in undergraduate science curricula to address acceptance, and it will represent a new survey that can be used by science education researchers to facilitate new work asking questions about students’ climate change acceptance. Overall, development of this new survey will support NSF’s mission of preparing a STEM-literate public that is ready to support and benefit from the advancement of science and develop shared metrics for use across science fields. The central goal of this project is to develop a new survey, the Acceptance of Climate Change Scale (ACC). To meet this goal, the project has three subgoals: (1) Define acceptance of climate change for undergraduate science populations; (2) Follow established practices to develop the Acceptance of Climate Change Scale (ACC); (3) Validate and pilot the ACC and use the ACC to measure science undergraduate students' acceptance of climate change through a quantitative study. The scope of the project includes undergraduate science student (biology, chemistry, and geoscience) populations within the US. The first steps in developing the ACC will be to identify and compile definitions of acceptance or rejection of climate change. Second, knowledge generated from the first steps will inform the development of the ACC. After initial field testing of the ACC, the ACC will be administered to students in science courses across the disciplines of biology, chemistry, and geosciences at a wide range of higher education institutions across the US to increase the generalizability of the tool and to quantify students’ acceptance of climate change and factors that relate to this acceptance. The five-stage development process of the ACC will follow accepted standards for educational and psychological testing, including item creation, expert review, think-aloud interviews, item revision, and retesting. Further, psychometric analysis of the new survey will rely on these standards for testing the validity (e.g., content, internal, concurrent, and convergent validity) and reliability (e.g., internal reliability of instrument, replication of testing nationally) of the ACC. The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.